Well, hello there and welcome to this episode of The Terri Cole Show.
I wanna start with a question.
Do you ever have, let's say, a big fight with your partner and then it's not resolved, then
you wake up in the morning and both of you just act like it didn't happen?
Anybody?
Or maybe you have unexpressed expectations and desires of what your partner or your friends
or your family might do for you, but they don't do it and then you're disappointed.
Anybody?
Well, what we're talking about and what I'm talking about in this episode is the danger
of having silent agreements with people.
I'm also gonna be breaking down, what is it?
What are silent agreements?
What are expressed agreements?
And I'm gonna give you some questions so you can understand where you're doing this in
your life because it is bad for you and bad for your relationship.
So before we get started, if you happen to be new to this YouTube channel, well hello
and welcome.
Please introduce yourself in the comments.
We are a very friendly group.
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And I roll out new stuff every Tuesday and every Thursday, and I wouldn't want you to
miss a thing.
And if you are new here, my name is Terri Cole, I'm a licensed psychotherapist, a relationship
expert, and the author of Boundary Boss, which you can get at boundarybossbook.com.
So I'd love to highlight your questions and your comments.
You guys know I read everything.
So this is a comment from Linda Gross under the video, 7 Happiness Habits to Try Today.
"Hey Terri, I do most of the 7 happiness habits and I'm doing the work to expand and continue
to curate my happiness.
All your podcasts, newsletters, boundary book and courses have deeply changed me for the
better."
Amazing, Linda.
"I have boundaries and even heard my brother apologize to me, and my mom apologized too."
Wow.
"I continue to read my notes and the Boundary Boss Bill of Rights, it's on my phone so I
can refer to it easily.
Thank you for helping me find me."
Well, Linda, I am so excited for you and I am so grateful that you took the time to write
in and tell us what's happening for you and how you're feeling.
Right on.
All right, let's move it on into today's content.
So silent agreements, what are they?
Let's just establish that first, silent agreements are the unspoken agreements and assumed rules
of engagement that we have in our relationships.
A silent agreement is usually one that you have not vocally agreed to or verbally expressed.
So a lot of times we have relationships or families of origin that didn't do a lot of
talking.
I know my family of origin didn't, so I've had many clients who, you know, came from
families with disordered boundaries or addiction issues or whatever it is.
And there may be like a huge brawl the night before.
Or someone's like falling down drunk and the next morning their mother's like, "hi, how
do you want your eggs?"
No conversation about what happened.
And how this is bad for us - there's a million different ways how it's not good for us.
But when you think about what happens, especially when you're a kid: you have an experience,
you hear fighting, you hear someone drunk, you hear something breaking, and then the
next morning no one acknowledges it.
So now you are learning.
Someone is teaching you that we don't talk about those things.
And making and maintaining silent agreements in our relationships is really a learned behavior.
It's something that we saw.
Most of us, if you've done it, cuz I certainly had it in my life until I had a lot of therapy.
This is how it is.
These are things we don't talk about.
So if you're struggling now, it probably means that you witnessed this or experienced this
dysfunctional behavior as a pattern growing up.
In my family of origin, certainly there was a silent agreement that we wouldn't talk about
anything that was too messy, right?
And no one was allowed to express anger.
That was also part of the way it was when I was growing up.
But if you grew up and it's almost like your reality was not acknowledged, right?
There's a certain amount of denial when we don't talk about the stuff that's going on,
and it teaches you to deny how you feel or what you think.
I would be too afraid to ask questions about things.
So you just sort of slough over it.
You learn to hide your head in the sand to a degree, at least I did in my family of origin.
And this is something that is damaging, because it isn't like I didn't have those experiences.
And it isn't like you don't remember what happened, it just means you're taught to sort
of stuff what happens.
So silent agreements create disordered emotional boundaries and miscommunication, right?
We don't know what's going on with other people because we're making a lot of assumptions
about them or we're anticipating a certain reaction to them.
So we just avoid the conversation, right?
Like at the top of this, I was talking about if you had a fight with your partner and you
didn't resolve it, and then you went to bed and then in the morning you both act like
it didn't happen.
That disagreement, those feelings, they don't go anywhere, right?
They're still within you and they're still unresolved.
So I want you to look at, and part of what I'm gonna be teaching you in this episode
is you need to identify in your life where do you have silent agreements?
There's certain cultural aspects of this as well, because there are certain cultures that
are way more open.
And I would say if we were just looking at like European and North American, a lot of
European culture, maybe not English, but European meaning, Spanish cultures.
There's the possibility that there's more openness to having conversations about what
is really going on.
Where I would say North America and certainly in a more WASPy culture, and that's sort of
where I'm from.
There's a lot of things that it is considered gauche to talk about.
It's considered like in bad form to talk about these things, and that's even within the family.
So I'm not even just talking about like what you talk about publicly, it's what you're
talking about privately.
So the same way that we have downloaded blueprints around all the other things, boundaries, how
we relate to finances, relationships, we have a downloaded blueprint around silent agreements.
So in the guide, you can go to terricole.com/guide.
I'm gonna give you some questions so that you can start to identify, if this resonates
with you, like, yes, I'm doing this, you can start to identify where did it start?
Where did you learn it?
Because it really does matter.
We need to have a deeper self-understanding if we want to change something because it
can be very difficult, especially the things that are ingrained in us in childhood.
I also think that there's a lot of disappointment that we can avoid because other ways that
we have sort of silent expectations, little bit different than silent agreements, but
silent expectations is like you have a long day at work and you get home and there's a
sinkful of dishes which might not normally make you upset, but maybe today because you're
exhausted, it did.
And now because your partner should have done that, now suddenly in your mind, and instead
of having the conversation or texting and saying, "Hey babe, I've had a really long
day.
If there's dishes, can you do them?"
It's basically making all these assumptions about what your partner should know about
where you are right now, about what you experienced today and you haven't even talked to them.
So this sets us up for disappointment, but it also sets our partner up to feel bad about
not doing a thing that they didn't read our mind to do.
So we can be frustrated and be like, they're not holding up their end of the bargain, but
it actually was not an expressed bargain unless it's their job to do the dishes and your job
to do something else.
That's a different situation.
But what I'm seeing most of the time in my therapy practice is that there's an expectation
that the other person will read your mind and that you won't have to say what it is
that you want.
So these unexpressed expectations set everyone up to fail.
They set you up to be frustrated, but they also set the other person up to feel like
a jerk, even though they haven't really done anything wrong.
So when we take a closer look at silent agreements, what do they do for us?
Like, what is the secondary gain of being in a silent agreement?
Well, it spares everyone having a hard conversation.
And the thing is, as we know, that is a short term plan and it's a short-term gain because
it creates long-term dysfunction, miscommunication, frustration, hurt feelings, but it's like
this short-term gain.
You don't have to have the conversation in the short-term.
So we don't want that.
This life and healthy relationships, you guys, you know this, this is a long game.
Our short-term fixes don't work in a long game.
We need to go, how do I wanna be interacting on a daily basis?
So I'm gonna give you some ways that you can identify the silent agreements of what you
are doing right now in your life.
Because the truth when it comes to the way that we feel, what we need, what do I always
say?
There's only two options.
We can either talk them out or we will act them out.
Those are the only two choices.
So it's not like never having that conversation that you need to have is something that makes
sense because it actually doesn't.
You're going to have to do something in some way because here's the thing, we will act
out those things and a lot of times we do it in these covert behaviors, these passive
aggressive ways of communicating it.
What happens when we do that is that there's a high probability of being misunderstood
or certainly not being understood accurately or letting the other person know that we're
off with these behaviors, but they don't know the specifics of why.
So we need clean and expressed agreements in our relationships and when we have them,
the likelihood of us being more understood in a real way, being happier, being healthier,
it's just so much greater and you can learn to do it.
So the first thing we're gonna do is just raise your awareness about where you might
be doing this.
So in the guide I'm gonna give you some questions that you can basically ask yourself, which
is, how often are you
in a silent agreement with the people in your life, right?
And sometimes, and I'm breaking down the question so it's easier for you to answer cuz you may
not be able to answer that one.
Like, when you really want someone to do something for you, do you think that they should just
intuit it, that they should understand it without you expressing it?
Or they should just know because you think it's obvious?
Then you're gonna make a list of who you sort of do that with.
Who do you let offensive comments pass, right?
Telling yourself that they didn't mean anything by it, or that you don't wanna make a big
deal.
Again, this is a silent agreement where they're gonna say something that's totally offensive
and you are silently agreeing that you are not gonna say anything about it even though
you are offended.
So you're gonna make a list of those people, and making a list about these assumptions
that we have about others, right?
Who might we think that these people have the same values as us, even though we don't
actually have that evidence?
Again, this brings us back to positive projection, which I've talked about in other episodes,
where we are positively projecting, where we're projecting onto other people, sort of
our positive attributes, even though we don't actually know that they have 'em.
And then I think what will really be revealing for you about the silent agreement is answering
some of the blueprint questions, right?
This is learned behavior, where did you learn it?
So all of that is gonna be for you in the guide.
Go to terricole.com/guide and you will answer those questions because part of it is it's
very personal to you, right?
This is not something that I can say, oh, everyone has this, or they have it this exact
way.
A lot of families interact in this way, but it's unique to you, right?
We don't wanna be communicating in this covert way.
I found that with, from coming from my family of origin, of having a decent amount of silent
agreements, especially around painful or messy conversations.
There was a lot when I was growing up.
My older sisters acting out, running away, like doing lots of different things and there
would not be a lot of conversation about it.
So for me, that created a scarier situation.
I would try to talk to my sisters about it, but I knew I couldn't really talk to my parents
about it.
This is when my parents were still together and I learned that that was a way of dealing
with unpleasant topics or things that I didn't know how to handle, and all of that I needed
to unlearn in therapy because in the first few long-term relationships that I had, my
whole way I related to them was silent agreements and unexpressed expectations.
And so of course I was always left in a position of not getting my needs met, being upset,
feeling unimportant.
There were so many things that came along with it.
And I remember my college boyfriend being like, "Ter, it's so unfair that you expect
me to read your mind.
Like, I don't know what's going on if you don't tell me."
And I remember at the time just being like, well, you should.
Basically was my answer.
And of course, you know, years later I was like, oh, poor, poor him, .
You know, like that's not that much fun to be on the receiving end of.
And it took a minute to understand where I was doing this, why I was doing it in therapy,
and then learning to say, Hey, let's talk about this, or let's make expressed agreements
about whatever the thing was, whether it was.
By the time I got into a relationship with my husband, Victor, you know, I was already
in my early thirties and I'd had a lot of therapy since I got into therapy at 19.
So I was able to just have those conversations and get my needs met by being able to tell
Vic what my needs were.
And instead of the silent agreements and being off about stuff where he was confused, I was
able to have expressed and clean agreements.
And that is another thing that I'll be putting in the guide with you.
Like what does it look like to have clean agreements?
It means you're not making assumptions.
It means you're actually having the conversation.
And yeah, you know what?
You're right, it does make you vulnerable because this is the thing, if we think about
what would the secondary gain of not having expressed agreements is: not having to have
those conversations, right?
We don't have to do the thing that we feel like we can't do.
But here's the thing, you can do it.
You are completely capable of doing it.
You just need a little bit of a guide.
So once we identify where we're not expressing what we need or what we want, then you can
learn to figure out what are the right scripts for you and you can learn to verbalize what
it is that you want.
Because here's the thing, the amount of frustration and anger that goes along with having these
unexpressed agreements, having these unexpressed expectations, it's really negatively impacts
the quality of your life.
And with a couple of simple changes, right?
You can have a simple and calm conversation, an open dialogue, actively listening to the
other person.
Now simple doesn't always mean easy, but you can do it.
And if you are an empath or a highly sensitive person, silent agreements are so incredibly
real because we are naturally so attuned to what the other person wants.
And it can be so easy to sort of self abandon or throw ourselves under the bus because we're
worried we can feel this emotional pressure within ourselves to sort of acquiesce or give
in because we're so hypersensitive to the way other people feel.
So it's especially important if you identify as an empath or an HSP, a highly sensitive
person, that you get clear about where you might be participating in silent agreements
that are not in your best interests, right?
And not in the best interest of your relationships, your friendships, your career, whatever it
may be.
So I have everything for you in the guide.
I'm really curious to see your 2 cents on silent versus expressed or clean agreements.
So drop me comments in all the places, you can tag me on Instagram.
Let me know that you listened or watched this episode and what your thoughts are on it.
I hope this added value to your life and that you guys have an amazing week and as always,
take care of you.